Recently, I’ve been getting asked my thoughts on the news of GIPHYs new video platform that was launched last month. The company that has been quietly serving over 10 billion pieces of content daily across messaging apps and social media Stories is finally turning on the sound.
If you didn’t hear, last month GIPHY released a new video platform that allows brands to upload 30-second videos (yes, with sound) to their platform. GIPHY recommended an ideal video length of 15-seconds to users because of our ever-dwindling attention spans. The ability to upload videos to GIPHY is only available for select brand partners, so not everyone with a brand channel will have access to the feature yet.
The two core changes here are the addition of sound and increased maximum video length.
This feature will be most useful for entertainment and media companies that want to share richer snippets of their content. It will be interesting to see how the many CPG brands that are already using GIF marketing will use this feature. Maybe we’ll see more branded “short-films” from these CPG brands - I just hope they don’t start lazily uploading 30-second commercials.
But what does this mean for GIFs?
The term “GIF” will evolve and no longer be limited to the file format, instead becoming a synonym and short-hand for “short-form video”
In the future, we may see the actual .gif file format drop off in favor of the MP4 file format, which has its advantages over the .gif file format including faster rendering time, higher image resolution, and lower storage costs.
The end-user doesn’t care if they are sharing a GIF or MP4 file in their messaging conversations, they just want to share a short clip that has good video-quality and quick rendering times. In the future, the term “GIF” will evolve and not be limited to the file format, and become a synonym and short-hand for “short-form video”.
The introduction of GIPHY Video won’t change the current experience for many end-users of GIFs. Users will most likely share GIPHY Video in the same way they currently share traditional GIFs - in conversations in messaging apps. We may see a change in the way people use GIPHY.com. Rather than using GIPHY primarily within messaging and social media apps people may start to visit the GIPHY site/app daily like they would Instagram or Twitter to digest trending news and culture in the form of short video clips.
For marketers, the addition of GIPHY Video is just another reason to start experimenting with GIF marketing and thinking about how to best implement it for your brand.
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